To be or not

As the announcement setting the date for the general election draws ever nearer, the spades are out, and entrenched positions are being dug at a rate of knots.

Politics is the UK is a strange business. The dreadful system of voting we have in place ensures the two-party system’s survival, and it’s only because Gordon Brown is starting to feel the heat that he’s talking about discussing a reform.  But views on Brown, Blair, Thatcher and Major are polarised, with many placing Thatcher at the top of their ‘to loathe’ list and many equally regarding Blair as a warmongering liar.

A local Aberconwy Tory observed the other day that ‘I reckon Mrs Thatcher will go down as a great Prime Minister’ which, if nothing else, proves how short memories can be.  So it’s often worth stepping back and looking at what different PMs have left as a legacy to the UK.

Margaret Thatcher's "principles of capitalism are under question," wailed Maurice Saatchi, the man who gave us the "Labour isn't working" slogan in 1979 – before his heroine tripled unemployment. A Billy Elliot version of history has made Thatcher a "boo-word in British politics", London's mayor Boris Johnson bleats. If only young people knew, insist the irreconcilable Tory diehards, what a basket-case Britain was in the 1970s – an "offshore banana republic", a land of perpetual power cuts, strikes and unburied bodies – they would understand why ­millions had to lose their jobs, industries and communities had to be destroyed and billions had to be handed over to the wealthy. Britain in the 70s, the high Tory Simon Heffer wrote last week, felt like the Soviet bloc, where men with "bad teeth and ill-fitting suits" (union leaders) called the shots in public life.

You'd never guess from all this fevered snobbery and retrospective catastrophism that average economic growth in Britain in the dismal 1970s, at 2.4% a year, was almost exactly the same as in the sunny Thatcherite 1980s – though a good deal more fairly distributed – and significantly higher than in the free-market boom years of the last two decades. Nor would you imagine that there was far greater equality and social mobility than after Thatcher got to work. Or that, while industrial conflict was often sharp in the 1970s, there was nothing to match the violence of the riots and industrial confrontations of Thatcher's Britain.

Tony Blair was unique;  the most electable politician in years, was how Frank Fields describes him, but what did he actually achieve? The Labour government from 1997 produced the longest period of sustained low inflation since the 60s,  introduced the National Minimum Wage, cut overall crime by 32 per cent, got young people achieving some of the best ever results at 14, 16, and 18, has added 85,000 more nurses, 32,000 more doctors, and brought back matrons to hospital wards.He also oversaw the raising of  child benefit up 26 per cent since 1997, brought in the £200 winter fuel payment to pensioners & up to £300 for over-80s and added 36,000 more teachers in England and 274,000 more support staff and teaching assistants. You can also include the dreadful child tax credit system, the cleanest rivers, beaches, drinking water and air since before the industrial revolution, free TV licences for over-75s, free off peak local bus travel for over-60s, free eye test for over 60s and free entry to national museums and galleries.

But there’s also the incredibly worrying PFI scheme, the imposition of more managers than doctors in the NHS and more.  In terms of Northern Ireland, however, his input might have resolved a dangerous situation but most folks over here don’t worry about that too much.

Sadly, what he will be most remembered for is the war, most critics having conveniently forgotten Thatcher’s escapade.  However, so long as we have the two party system and the first-past-the-post voting process, we’ll have polarisation of views, centred on which Prime Minister did the best  The truth is that all Prime ministers want power, and with that power they often forget just how the normal folk in this great country of ours live. Perhaps we need to elect a benign dictator of no fixed political persuasion, endow them with ultimate power for one year, then take a vote at the end of the year to decide if they’re worth keeping sacking or shooting.  Maybe then we’d get someone we deserved. Or maybe we already have.